Thread: Inside the Homes of Mexico’s Rich and Infamous (Mexican Drug Lords)

Inside the Homes of Mexico’s Rich and Infamous

NYTimes
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: January 18, 2012



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The Mexico City home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican pharmaceuticals importer who maintains his innocence on charges of importing banned substances.

THERE are precious few real estate secrets in the United States. Web sites have turned nearly every neighborhood into a big open-house, with slide shows, video tours and price histories, while celebrities, from A-listers to D-listers, regularly open their doors to TV cameras and magazine photographers.

But here in Mexico, only vacation properties receive such treatment. The homes where well-heeled Mexicans actually live are usually surrounded by gates or walls that guard residents’ privacy and protect against intruders. And none are more hidden than the homes owned by the country’s drug lords.

These are the palaces of legend. In Mexican novels, and in movies, the houses of the illicitly rich and infamous are louche, luxurious affairs, with toilets made of gold, mounds of cocaine or cash lying around and furniture of thronelike proportions. In the public imagination, what might be called “narquitecture” or “narco style” is all gaudy excess — part “Real Housewives,” part “Scarface,” part conquistador.

In reality, only some of this is true. As a Mexico correspondent for The New York Times, I often spend my time trying to understand shadowed worlds, from illegal immigration to drugs, and the more I’ve tried to figure out how the country’s criminal networks work, the more I’ve wondered about the people who run them: where do they live, and what is their home life really like?

It’s not necessarily the kind of article you can report by knocking on doors, though I did do some of that in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, in cases where I could find the addresses of well-known incidents, and drug figures who had been arrested. I also enlisted officials at Mexico’s federal auction agency to help me get into several seized homes around Mexico City, all of them recently occupied by people with known or suspected ties to organized crime (and in Mexico, that usually means drugs).

Because the authorities had secured the premises just hours after the residents departed — while much of my tour took place months or even years later — I often felt as if I were sneaking around in the Mexican version of Pompeii: under layers of dust, the sense of day-to-day life was immediately apparent.

Altogether, the homes I toured were a mixture of stereotype and dissonance. The design and the items left behind pointed to the ridiculous and the banal, with touches that were confounding or tragic. There were obvious signs of young men making and spending too much too quickly, but there were also signs of family life, danger, boredom and a conspicuous desire to appear sophisticated.

In a country as transparent as a blackout curtain, the drug dealers’ homes ultimately provided a reality check — a rare window into the illicit and personal world of Mexico’s criminal culture.

FROM PEASANTS TO PASHAS

Drugs, like oil, can produce piles of cash in a hurry. And in several Mexican cities, there are massive homes with domes that have an Arabian flourish. The desert mansion of Amado Carrillo Fuentes — a drug lord famous for transporting cocaine in jumbo jets, and for dying after botched plastic surgery in 1997 — has even been called the Palace of 1,001 Nights, after the book of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories that included Aladdin.

In gritty cities like Ciudad Juárez, these domes now appear wherever the trappings of upward mobility are for sale, mainly at upscale malls and housing developments.

In fact, while Islamic touches have often signified wealth in Mexico, some academics who study the culture of Mexican crime say the domes, or cupolas, have become visual shorthand for the drug trade’s enduring appeal: it offers a way to move up. For many people here, crime represents a meritocracy in a country of oligarchy and poverty. Work hard, do what it takes and a crime boss will reward you with money, cars and responsibility.

“They find in the narco world everything they cannot find anywhere else,” said José Manuel Valenzuela, a sociology professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research institute in Tijuana. “It’s not just about money. It’s about power.”

Showing off that power made more sense in the early years of the drug boom. In the ’70s and ’80s, even into the ’90s, building like a king impressed recruits and competitors. But over time, as conflicts have increased among the cartels, and as the Mexican and American governments have tried harder to crack down on trafficking, drug lords have been keeping a lower profile, buying existing houses rather than building obvious, ostentatious houses from scratch.

Indeed, most of the homes I visited were hardly palaces. Many were entirely average and darkly utilitarian, including a beige concrete home in Juárez known as the House of Death because of the dozen bodies found there in 2004.

Even on the more luxurious end of the spectrum, most of the homes could best be described as upper-middle-class. Packed into nice neighborhoods, they were usually three- to five-bedroom houses of around 3,000 square feet, lacking exterior charm or adornment. The biggest tipoffs about the occupants: a shortage of street-facing windows, and the best security systems money could buy.

MIX AND MATCH (BUT MOSTLY JUST MIX)

Imagine entering a furniture store and being told you had 60 seconds to choose the furnishings for 15 rooms. Most of us would freeze. But the houses of some capos suggest that they made snap decisions. As in, “Give me one of everything.”

In the fanciest home I saw in Mexico City, once occupied by a pharmaceuticals importer accused of conspiring with the Sinaloa cartel, baroque tables mingled with minimalist leather couches, Oriental rugs and a knockoff of Picasso’s “Guernica.”

At a more modest home by a golf course, where much of the furniture had been auctioned off, the last remaining table held a smorgasbord of appliance parts and kitchenware with mismatched designs, all overseen by a tall ceramic angel.

Professor Valenzuela offered some insight into these chaotic interiors. One of the great myths of the drug world, he told me, is that riches come easily. “It’s not easy, you have to risk your life,” he said. “It’s fast.”

And that seems to be how these drug dealers spent their money: wildly, as if on a shopping spree with a deadline imposed by a dangerous profession.

THE HOME OFFICE

Lots of drug dealers, the world over, work from home and so their houses tend to display a mix of business and everyday living. This was especially true of the split-level home of José Jorge Balderas Garza, a k a J. J., a confessed deputy to Edgar Valdez Villarreal, called La Barbie, a former football star in Texas who became the kingpin of Acapulco.

The house, in Mexico City’s pricey northern hills, has bedrooms on the top floor by the front door. Below are a kitchen, and a dining room that had been converted into a sprawling weight room with mirrors, which leads to a living room dominated by a large wooden desk in the corner.

“Look at this,” said my government tour guide as we entered. It was about a year after the police had arrested Mr. Balderas, and the desk was still covered with evidence of J. J.’s work: plastic baggies and rubber bands, empty cases for Glock pistols. Inside the desk were several boxes of prescription pills and liquids, including a hormone drug often used to build muscle.

Nearby, on top of the desk, were two nipples for baby bottles, an incongruous sight given that the floor below was a caricature of a bachelor pad, with black lights, red velvet curtains, zebra-print furniture, a bar and even a disco ball.

Mr. Balderas and his entourage seemed to have left in a hurry. On a table in the middle of the room, there were overturned rocks glasses, along with empty bottles of Buchanan’s whisky and empty cans of Red Bull.

But there were also signs of what anthropologists like Howard Campbell at the University of Texas at El Paso call generational evolution.

Young drug dealers like Mr. Balderas tend to exhibit more cosmopolitan taste than their predecessors. “They’re proud and they’re vain,” Professor Campbell said — as evidenced by the Montblanc bag near the bar downstairs and the menu on the refrigerator from Shu, a sushi restaurant described online by patrons as “trendy” and “overpriced.”

I noticed the same menu on the kitchen counter of an upscale high-rise apartment I toured nearby. Apparently, some narcos prefer to order in.

INDULGING THE KIDS

In one Mexico City house, a three-story pink monster with a glass-enclosed pool, there were three child-size toothbrushes in one of the bathrooms, presumably all for the son of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman arrested in 2007 for importing banned substances often used to produce methamphetamines. (He has maintained his innocence, though the authorities found guns and more than $200 million hidden in his home.)

For me, these tiny toothbrushes were haunting — the kind of detail that lingered, because it revealed what I saw in so many of these homes: a combination of not just excess and risk, but also family life.

In the master bedroom, the boy’s school photo and a drawing he had made of mountains with loving messages for his parents (“te quiero mamá, te quiero papá”) had been swept up in a pile with a velvet Fabergé case, a DVD of a movie titled “The Corruptor” and a syringe. A security guard pointed out an empty case for a Beretta pistol.

How, I wondered, could parents expose their children to such a dangerous trade? I thought of Eduardo Arellano Félix, who was at home with his 11-year-old daughter during the shootout that led to his capture. Did he think he would never be caught or killed?

Professor Valenzuela, the sociologist, said it was just the opposite. Children are an important part of narco life, he said, because parents want their legacy continued. They also want the people they love and trust to enjoy what they worked for.

“Narcos are much more complex than people think,” Professor Valenzuela said. “They’re not monsters or aliens from another planet. They have a big part of the same social values as everyone else.”

Perhaps. But the Mexican drug world has become much more ruthless in the last decade. In the early years, there were whimsical indulgences, like the guitar-shaped pool built by a Juárez don in the ’80s, and the castle as big as a house that he commissioned for his daughter’s dolls.

But playfulness has long since given way to a culture of unremitting violence, with more than 47,000 people killed in the last five years. That home with the guitar-shaped pool and the dollhouse is now a nonprofit physical therapy center, mainly for disabled children — many of them being treated for bullet wounds.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/ga...ords.html?_r=1